Today and Galway

Hola! Today was the end of the first class! Prof assigned a paper, not very difficult, to be turned in at our leisure. Very Irish, lol! After class, my housemate Kasey and I jumped the hop-on, hop-off bus to tour Dublin, and we got off at the Dublin Zoo and some other stops--good times.

I intended to write the paper today so I would have it done... but all I have is a heading and a working title. Fun. ;-)

I am sleep, and we are getting up early tomorrow! Calling a cab around 7 AM to catch the 8 AM train to Limerick, where we will meet our tourguide, who will take us to some castles and the CLIFFS OF MOHER! So excited! Expect excessive pictures.

Okay, well, I am sleepy, so that is all you get for tonight! And feel special, because Facebook did not get a pic update today. ;-)

End Week 2

Tomorrow will signal the end of my first class here at ACD! We will conclude Anglo-Irish Writers tomorrow, and despite spending very little time in class, I have enjoyed learning about Dublin and its writers on trips and excursions. :-) We spent little time on the literature itself, but I feel like I have enough background info on the writers and the city setting to read these books again on my own, especially Ulysses by James Joyce.

We've spent the past two days on Joyce--yesterday we visited the Joyce Center in Dublin City Centre, and today we went to the Joyce Tower and Museum on the coast of Dublin--one of our coolest trips, in my opinion! :-) Now, I am so ready to tackle Ulysses. Though it is a challenging book, it is supposed to be genius and very funny--it seems everyone in Dublin has read it. The owner of a mom and pop bookshop on O'Connell street said to me, when I bought it, in his thick accent-- "Best book in the world." And supposedly, more is written about James Joyce than Shakespeare.

Today it was lovely at the tower! Great view and my first time on Ireland's coast. I was camera happy, but here are my favorite shots.

It was gorgeous. It was comforting too--as soon as I could smell the sea air, I thought of Charleston. The ocean smells the same all over the globe, I suppose. It's soothing in a way.

This weekend we booked a day trip to Galway to see the Cliffs of Moher... but the current train strike is interfering... we hope they figure it out before tomorrow, but that might not happen. I am anxious about losing a weekend., because I want to see Belfast too! We'll see how it goes.

Well, that's all the update I can manage for now--it is taco night over at the boys' place! ;-)

Rain Rain, Go Away!

It is very nasty in Dublin today! Rainy and windy and cold. Right now, I'm chilling in the computer lab with the gang on the top floor of one of the school buildings. In lieu of having class, tonight our Anglo-Irish Lit gang is going on a Literary Pub Crawl.

For more info, click here: http://www.dublinpubcrawl.com/fa_qustions.htm

Should be fun! The actors/tour guides will take us to different pubs and act out scenes from Irish lit along the way. But I seriously hope that it stopes raining by that time!

Yesterday, we went to go see the Seafarer at the Abbey Theatre--great play!! Hilarious, but also with some somber moments and some definite, sometimes subtle, religious symbolism. It was so much fun.

Most importantly, today is my mum's birthday! Happy Birthday, Mom!! Make the guys take you out to dinner and I will call tonight! :-D

Reflections on Cork or, On Wishing and Kissing

First of all, let it be known that I referred to Dublin, Ireland as home multiple times this weekend! ;-)

Second of all, Cork was lovely! The city of Cork was much more urban than I expected, but the the land around it was very much Irish countryside. Very lovely, and I took excessive pictures from the bus, and annoyed the people trying to sleep. Oops!

We got up right after 4 AM to jump in our clothes to walk to our other friends' apartments, pick them up, and catch the 6 AM bus to Cork, so we could have as full a day as possible. The process was hindered by one of our housemates (who was scheduled to go on the trip) coming home at around 4 AM rather inebriated but still determined that she would not be left behind. But I won't spend time on that, as the important thing is we all made the bus and got to Cork fine, and the 4 hour bus ride (and the nap she took) was enough to bring her back to her senses. And she was very embarassed, so therefore, all is forgiven and that part of the story is done. ;-)

I have to say that I took no pictures of the countryside on the way there because I was asleep within minutes. But once we got to Cork, it was lovely! More urban than I expected, but much smaller than Dublin.

We wandered around the city for awhile trying to find our hostel and check in (and turns out we passed it several times as we trapeezed around the city asking for directions) and it was nice and cozy for a hostel. New experience for all of us. After this we found a cute cafe (it literally looked like a husband and wife cooking in a kitchen with a few extra tables) and ate, as we were starving!

Blarney was next on our list--the only official outing we had planned. For the rest of the trip we were going to just go with the flow. The first time we went to wait at the Blarney bus stop, the driver whizzed past us with nothing but a shrug--apparently the bus was full, but he didn't even stop to tell us that. So we wandered around the city for an hour or so, at an open market, while we waited for the next bus. We caught the bus to Blarney, explored the grounds, and then, in two groups, set out for our main objective--to kiss the Blarney stone and get the "gift of gab!"

The castle was so cool. They have literally left it as it was, save for a rope to help you climb the very narrow, very steep, very tightly spiraled stairs, and the iron bars around the edges to keep you from falling. In fact, they posted a liability release at the entrance! The castle is old and possibly dangerous. Nice. We went right in, of course, explored, but as cool as the castle was, we wanted to kiss that rock! You get to the very top, tip the guy who's going to hold your legs, hold on to the railing and lean back, upside down as far as you can, and kiss the bottom stone. There were definitely lipstick marks on it! And I hit my head coming back up. I have a battle wound, haha! But it was so cool. And when you get back to the bottom of the castle, you can stand underneath and watch other people lean over and kiss the stone! We got to see a few of our friends do it from the bottom view. That was cool. It is rather high!

Also on the grounds of the Blarney castle were some old stairs, carved from stone, called the Wishing Stairs. I briefly mentioned this last night--the story goes that a woman accused of being a witch, miraculously survived from drowning, and revealed the stairs ability to grant wishes. The trick is, if you walk up and down them with your eyes closed, thinking only of your wish, it should come true in a year. I will let you know how mine works out, I'm sure. ;-) We all did it, and no one fell. Some were more daring and did it backwards!

After this, we explored the caves under the castle, wandered around taking pictures of ourselves and the landscape, then hopped the bus back to Cork. At this point, our 8 person party decided to split into groups of 3 and 5. Three of us, including myself, elected to explore Cork City, grab some food, and head back to the hostel to relax. The others (and I wish now that I had gone with them) set out to find a bar and bistro that had the same name as one girl's last name, as she wanted a picture in front of it. Turns out, this pub was in a tiny seaside town on the outskirts of Cork where people had never seen Americans! I wish I had gone, but I was fun to explore Cork City and relax at the hostel and talk with the two other girls.

When the others got back, we went to an Internet Cafe (as I posted last night) to connect with the rest of th world. Then it was back to the hostel and goodnight! I headed back to Dublin (which we called "home") with some of the other girls in the morning, and some of the group stayed longer to shop and do more sightseeing. (I am starting to be aware of how much more expensive everything is, so I am attempting to be thrifty.)

We got back to Dublin, ate at the house, and enjoyed some time to rest from the weekend. I don't have class in the morning--our class is going to a play in the evening instead, to experience some contemporary Irish theatre. So ends my first week in Ireland; here's to 3 even better ones to come!

Internet Cafe!

Right now, I'm sitting on the computer at an Internet Cafe in Cork! I have tried to Skype my parents and my aunt, but the connection is a little shaky from here. I'm sure it will work much better with my own laptop and headset back in Dublin. :-)

Cork is lovely! It's much more urban than I expected, but it's beautiful! We went to Blarney Castle and I kissed the Blarney Stone! It's supposed to give you the gift of gab, or eloquence! I could use some eloquence in my life. ;-) And at the Blarney Castle, they have these stairs called the Wishing Stairs--you go up and down with your eyes closed, thinking only of your wish, and it is supposed to come true in a year! So I will write again, May 24 2009, and see where I'm at with my wish. :-)

So, I kissed the Blarney Stone, and I hit my head on the castle wall on the way back up, haha! I will post the all the excessive Blarney and Cork pictures soon!

We're staying at a nice hostel called the Kenlay House, in Cork, for the night, and we will leave tomorrow around lunchtime to head back to Dublin! I will write again soon! :-D

Cork!

Ok, everyone! I will be out of contact via computer this weekend. A bunch of us are heading to Cork ghastly early tomorrow morning--we're catching a 6 AM bus so we can have as much of the day as possible. It should be around 10 AM when we get to Cork, and we're going to explore the countryside, go see the Blarney Castle (and yes, Carrie, I am going to kiss the Blarney Stone. I could use some eloquence in my life!), and find a restaraunt to chill and watch the Ireland/Serbia soccer game. After we do that, we'll head to the hostel to stay the night, and head back to Dublin Sunday morning. Expect many pictures.

Personally, I couldn't give a flying flip about soccer, but the other night, we watched the Manchester/Chelsea game in a pub with all the locals, and the atmosphere was great! It was basically like sitting in Wild Wings in Columbia when Clemson and Carolina play each other--big deal and very fun. Luckily for us, the majority of the locals pulled for Manchester, and they won, so we felt like our team had won, haha!

So anyway, I'll have my school provided mobile with me should anyone need to get in contact with me! I know you'll all be waiting for the awkward and obligatory Blarney stone picture! ;-)

End Week 1

A sample of pics from the week. Feeling too lazy to write captions, as it is past midnight 'round here. All you need to know is a park in the city, ghost tour, and National Gallery (which was gorgeous by the way.) So I have been chastised for not updating in a couple days. I am still alive, and still enjoying myself immensely! :-D


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I have learned that the classes here are very laid back. Most of the time we don't have class at all, we just take off on a field trip or watch a movie. Though, the first day we did have a great discussion, and we are asked to read four books and write a paper. Which we haven't even discussed and the class if halfway over. But like I said, Ireland is so laid back. I fit right in.


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I sent out my first batch of postcards. You won't believe how expensive this endeavor is, lol. So once you get a postcard, that's it, lol! Souvenier shopping is lots of fun too, but once again, I am buying very little because everything is so expensive 'round here. And completely off subject, my mostly northern fellow students say that I don't have much of a southern accent, but that it comes out occassionally when I talk, and much more when I call home. ;-)


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There is housing drama. We may end up being moved. I found out that the reason we aren't staying where the original stuff said we were was because the school lost their bid on the lease or something, and had to make other plans. I don't want to move, as right now I have my own room, and the perfect housemates! I just want my internet to work consistently, and I will be a happy camper.


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I miss camp! Love you guys!


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I won't be around the computer this weekend, as I and most of the other students are making our way, in three groups, I think, to Cork for the weekend. :-) I'm excited! I am going to kiss the Blarney Stone if it's the last thing I ever do. ;-) I could use the gift of gab; eloquence comes in handy! ;-)

Trinity College, O'Connell Street, and Random Pics!

Me, having a chat with Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square. ;-)
Random swans swimming in the canal by our house!!!
My lovely housemates! :-)

Lovely view from the bridge.
Trinity College!
Trinity's Book of Kells (sp?) sign. We were too poor to go in, haha!
Me posing with the college sign!
Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square

Some of my classmates plus a cool street.
Another classmate and another cool street. :-)
Bridge with a very pretty view. O'Connell Bridge, I think?
Main entrance to Trinity College.

Me and my housemate Kasey posing by some random door at Trinity!

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Hello, all! I know you guys probably care more about the pictures than about what I say, so I thought I'd get that done first! :-)

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Today, I had my first day of class. And it's going to be great!! I'm taking Anglo-Irish Writers for the first session, and turns out the student director, a young guy named Collum, who we've been hanging out with all weekend, touring and visiting sites, is the teacher! And for several of our classes, we're going off to tour literary sites such as the Writer's Museum, or one day class is cancelled to go on a literary pub crawl, to go to the same pubs that Joyce and Beckett and Wilde would have frequented! Even for non-drinkers such as myself, this will be loads of fun!

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Class is supposed to last from 9 to 1-- we probably went from 9:20 to 11:30 today, lol. Class was so laid back, but we had a great, in depth discussion of Irish identity and colonialization. And tomorrow, we aren't having official class, but we're going to the Dublin Writer's Museum! Heck yes, I wanted to see that anyway!

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After class, we ate lunch with our lunch vouchers in the school cafe, Speranza, (named after Oscar Wilde's mother because the school owns Oscar Wilde's childhood home!) and the food wasn't that bad! I got a sandwich, drink, and chioce of a candy or granola bar for 5 euro.

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After lunch, eight of us set out together to get books for our literature class, which turned out to be some kind of hunt! We checked several bookstores in North Dublin, and finally found three of the four we were hunting. While we were out roaming, we went to Trinity College, both to do the tourist thing, and also to get our pictures taken for an international student discount card! Discounts on bus fare, train fare, and lots of restaurants, plus a bunch of other things! Granted we had to pay for the card, so who knows if it will even out. I figure the card is worth it just in case I come back to Europe or it would look great in the scrapbook I'm sure I will make. ;-)

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Man, with all the walking, I swear I must have walked at least 10 miles today. My housemates and I feel like crotchety old women, because our legs are so sore. And our hot water is acting up again. Sad times!

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But the school is going to get all the outlets, the water, and the internet fixed within the week, thank goodness! I don't mind the old house, but I do wish that they would reduce the housing costs for the 6 of us since every other place is significantly newer and better maintained.

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I like it though. My housemates are great. We like each other too much to move and split up.

After loads of drama, and what I am sure was divine intervention, my loan check finally arrived back home! Thank goodness! It got lost in the mail, but luckily, landed in the hands of a kind soul who immediately called the loan company (who stupidly told him to mail it back to them, which would have delayed my recieving the funds for the trip for another possible two weeks!) but he decided, thinking that the girl who the check was for needed the money for something important, to mail it to the address on the envelope, so my parents recieved it today! Thank God!

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:-)

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I love it here. I can tell I will be anxious to return once my short month here is over. :-)

Mailing Addresses!

Hello, all!

If you would like to mail me a letter (only letters), you can mail it directly to my house here.

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Hillary B.
18 Lower Mount Pleasant Avenue
Dublin 6, Ireland

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If you are sending something that will not fit through a mail slot, like a package of some sort, you can send it to this address. Also, mail can go here too, if you just want to use one.

Hillary B.
c/0 Colum Cronin
American College Dublin
2 Merrion Square
Dublin 2, Ireland
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More pics tonight! :-)

Powercourt Gardens and Fish n Chips

Sunday in Ireland! The day started kind of late, about 9:45. We met at the school around 11, and took a bus to Powercourt Gardens in County Wicklow. It was gorgeous! I took like 58 pics there. The new profile pic is me smelling some roses growing up the side of the mansion. I uploaded some pics to facebook, and I will add some more here! See below for sampling of pics.

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After we all, walked arond the gardens for a couple of hours and took ridiculous amounts of pictures of the grounds, and some random pictures of ourselves posing with flowers, etc, the bus took us to the grocery store so we could get some stuff for our house and some food, because it is way too expensive to eat out every night! The dollar sucks. My 4.95 euro sandwich was actually 7+ US dollars. Boo.

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So, after we got back from the grocery store, we chilled for a bit, then me and my housemates went out to dinner at a famous fish 'n chips place around the corner from our house. It was a really cute place, and the food was pretty good. Also, chips are just french fries, by the way. Potato chips here are crisps, and fries are chips.

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What was hilarious, was that we were eating at a famous local shop, "Dublin's Oldest Chipper" as the sign said, and the Irish radio station, as we ate, was playing classic American songs, like "Sweet Home Alabama," and "Kokomo." It was hilarious. A couple pics from the restaurant are below.

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Apparently, famous people eat here! ;-)

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So classes start bright and early tomorrow! I think my housemate and I are going to jump the Dublin Hop on-Hop off bus and see what we can find! :-)

House Pics and Day 2

The crazy, Scooby-Doo esque keys.
The kitchen. This where you can tell they've recently redone the house. New stove, microwave, washer/dryer, etc.

This is me on the plane, posing and taking pictures of myself. The guy next to me was snickering.
Here is the outside view of the house where we're staying! Door knob in the middle, like hobbits have in the Shire! ;-) We have a cute iron gate too, it's adorable.
The street my house is on. Yay.
Living room at the house. Fun times. Towel and coffee mugs are catching the water that leaks when we use the upstairs shower. We gave our student director a list of maitenance issues, and this is one of them. Nothing is seriously wrong, just lots of little things. Some of the girls are irked, but it's an old, cozy house. I'm perfectly fine with it. :-)
My room. My roommate arrived here today from New York.

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I am so sad because I can't get to the pictures I took today! I forgot to put my memory card back in the camera last night, so those pics are stored in my camera's memory, and I didn't bring my camera's cord, just my memory card adapter. Sad day! So the facebook profile I had my friend take of me posing on Grafton Street and the picture of me tasting Guiness in the Guiness storehouse are stuck on my camera for now! But one of my housemates has a similar camera, so she might have brought her card. Fingers crossed.

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I kind of liked the taste of Guiness, but it was still too strong for me. They only gave us a very small taste, and I couldn't drink the whole thing. But it has a cool taste that reminded me of coffee. They gave us a coupon get a free pint in the upstairs lounge, but I got a Coke. LOL!

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We walk so much here; forget trying to exercise! It's a 20 minute walk to the school, and the city is huge. I walk SO much. It's great. But there is so much public transportation. Like trains go right down the roads with cars, and buses are everywhere, and cabs are everywhere.

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Dublin is a huge Charleston, basically. I love it.

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Hey! I have a cell phone, called a mobile (long I) in Ireland. If you want to call me, all incoming calls are free for me. It's like a Go-phone, you pay as you go. My phone had leftover money on it, and I added 10 euro, so call away! However, you all will be charged for the call, depending on your international call rates. Check with your provider.

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PHONE NUMBER: 011-353-86-302-9122 (just like that) I wonder if you guys could call me collect? Who knows? You're welcome to try, I have plenty of minutes. And I will post a mailing address as soon as I know what it is. :-)